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On 29 Nov 2021, Tritek <[email protected]> posted some
news:[email protected]:
> Democrats are too inbred to survive. Like those stinking Jews.
Everything was unfolding as it usually does. The academics who gathered in
Lisbon this summer for the International Society of Political
Psychologists annual meeting had been politely listening for four days,
nodding along as their peers took to the podium and delivered papers on
everything from the explosion in conspiracy theories to the rise of
authoritarianism.
Then, the mood changed. As one of the lions of the profession, 68-year-old
Shawn Rosenberg, began delivering his paper, people in the crowd of about
a hundred started shifting in their seats. They loudly whispered
objections to their friends. Three women seated next to me near the back
row grew so loud and heated I had difficulty hearing for a moment what
Rosenberg was saying.
What caused the stir? Rosenberg, a professor at UC Irvine, was challenging
a core assumption about America and the West. His theory? Democracy is
devouring itselfhis phrase and it wont last.
As much as President Donald Trumps liberal critics might want to lay
Americas ills at his door, Rosenberg says the president is not the cause
of democracys falleven if Trumps successful anti-immigrant populist
campaign may have been a symptom of democracys decline.
Were to blame, said Rosenberg. As in we the people.
Democracy is hard work. And as societys elitesexperts and public
figures who help those around them navigate the heavy responsibilities
that come with self-rulehave increasingly been sidelined, citizens have
proved ill equipped cognitively and emotionally to run a well-functioning
democracy. As a consequence, the center has collapsed and millions of
frustrated and angst-filled voters have turned in desperation to right-
wing populists.
His prediction? In well-established democracies like the United States,
democratic governance will continue its inexorable decline and will
eventually fail.
***
The last half of the 20th century was the golden age of democracy. In
1945, according to one survey, there were just 12 democracies in the
entire world. By the end of the century there were 87. But then came the
great reversal: In the second decade of the 21st century, the shift to
democracy rather suddenly and ominously stoppedand reversed.
Right-wing populist politicians have taken power or threatened to in
Poland, Hungary, France, Britain, Italy, Brazil and the United States. As
Rosenberg notes, by some metrics, the right wing populist share of the
popular vote in Europe overall has more than tripled from 4% in 1998 to
approximately 13% in 2018. In Germany, the right-wing populist vote
increased even after the end of the Great Recession and after an influx of
immigrants entering the country subsided.
A brief three decades after some had heralded the end of history its
possible that its democracy thats nearing the end. And its not just
populist rabble-rousers who are saying this. So is one of the
establishments pioneer social scientists, whos daring to actually
predict the end of democracy as we know it.
Rosenberg, who earned degrees at Yale, Oxford and Harvard, may be the
social scientist for our time if events play out as he suggests they will.
His theory is that over the next few decades, the number of large Western-
style democracies around the globe will continue to shrink, and those that
remain will become shells of themselves. Taking democracys place,
Rosenberg says, will be right-wing populist governments that offer voters
simple answers to complicated questions.
And therein lies the core of his argument: Democracy is hard work and
requires a lot from those who participate in it. It requires people to
respect those with different views from theirs and people who dont look
like them. It asks citizens to be able to sift through large amounts of
information and process the good from the bad, the true from the false. It
requires thoughtfulness, discipline and logic.
Unfortunately, evolution did not favor the exercise of these qualities in
the context of a modern mass democracy. Citing reams of psychological
research, findings that by now have become more or less familiar,
Rosenberg makes his case that human beings dont think straight. Biases of
various kinds skew our brains at the most fundamental level. For example,
racism is easily triggered unconsciously in whites by a picture of a black
man wearing a hoodie. We discount evidence when it doesnt square up with
our goals while we embrace information that confirms our biases. Sometimes
hearing were wrong makes us double down. And so on and so forth.
Our brains, says Rosenberg, are proving fatal to modern democracy. Humans
just arent built for it.
People have been saying for two millennia that democracy is unworkable,
going back to Plato. The Founding Fathers were sufficiently worried that
they left only one half of one branch of the federal government in the
hands of the people. And yet for two centuries democracy in America more
or less proceeded apace without blowing itself up.
So why is Rosenberg, who made his name back in the 1980s with a study that
disturbingly showed that many voters select candidates on the basis of
their looks, predicting the end of democracy now?
He has concluded that the reason for right-wing populists recent success
is that elites are losing control of the institutions that have
traditionally saved people from their most undemocratic impulses. When
people are left to make political decisions on their own they drift toward
the simple solutions right-wing populists worldwide offer: a deadly mix of
xenophobia, racism and authoritarianism.
The elites, as Rosenberg defines them, are the people holding power at the
top of the economic, political and intellectual pyramid who have the
motivation to support democratic culture and institutions and the power to
do so effectively. In their roles as senators, journalists, professors,
judges and government administrators, to name a few, the elites have
traditionally held sway over public discourse and U.S. institutionsand
have in that role helped the populace understand the importance democratic
values. But today that is changing. Thanks to social media and new
technologies, anyone with access to the Internet can publish a blog and
garner attention for their causeeven if its rooted in conspiracy and is
based on a false claim, like the lie that Hillary Clinton was running a
child sex ring from the basement of a Washington D.C. pizza parlor, which
ended in a shooting.
While the elites formerly might have successfully squashed conspiracy
theories and called out populists for their inconsistencies, today fewer
and fewer citizens take the elites seriously. Now that people get their
news from social media rather than from established newspapers or the old
three TV news networks (ABC, CBS and NBC), fake news proliferates. Its
surmised that 10 million people saw on Facebook the false claim that Pope
Francis came out in favor of Trumps election in 2016. Living in a news
bubble of their own making many undoubtedly believed it. (This was the
most-shared news story on Facebook in the three months leading up to the
2016 election, researchers report.)
The irony is that more democracyushered in by social media and the
Internet, where information flows more freely than ever beforeis what has
unmoored our politics, and is leading us towards authoritarianism.
Rosenberg argues that the elites have traditionally prevented society from
becoming a totally unfettered democracy; their oligarchic democratic
authority or democratic control has until now kept the authoritarian
impulses of the populace in check.
Compared with the harsh demands made by democracy, which requires a
tolerance for compromise and diversity, right-wing populism is like cotton
candy. Whereas democracy requires us to accept the fact that we have to
share our country with people who think and look differently than we do,
right-wing populism offers a quick sugar high. Forget political
correctness. You can feel exactly the way you really want about people who
belong to other tribes.
Right-wing populists dont have to make much sense. They can
simultaneously blame immigrants for taking jobs away from Americans while
claiming that these same people are lazy layabouts sponging off welfare.
All the populist followers care is that they now have an enemy to blame
for their feelings of ennui.
And unlike democracy, which makes many demands, the populists make just
one. They insist that people be loyal. Loyalty entails surrendering to the
populist nationalist vision. But this is less a burden than an advantage.
Its easier to pledge allegiance to an authoritarian leader than to do the
hard work of thinking for yourself demanded by democracy.
In sum, the majority of Americans are generally unable to understand or
value democratic culture, institutions, practices or citizenship in the
manner required, Rosenberg has concluded. To the degree to which they
are required to do so, they will interpret what is demanded of them in
distorting and inadequate ways. As a result they will interact and
communicate in ways that undermine the functioning of democratic
institutions and the meaning of democratic practices and values.
I should clarify that the loud whispers in the crowd in Lisbon werent a
response to Rosenbergs pessimism. This was after all a meeting of
political psychologistsa group who focus on flaws in voters thinking and
the violation of democratic norms. At the conference Ariel Malka reported
evidence that conservatives are increasingly open to authoritarianism.
Brian Shaffer related statistics showing that since Trumps election
teachers have noted a rise in bullying. Andreas Zick observed that racist
crimes shot up dramatically in Germany after a million immigrants were
allowed in.
What stirred the crowd was that Rosenberg has gone beyond pessimism into
outright defeatism. What riled the crowd was that hes seemingly embraced
a kind of reverence for elitism no longer fashionable in the academy. When
challenged on this front, he quickly insisted he didnt mean to exempt
himself from the claim that people suffer from cognitive and emotional
limitations. He conceded that the psychological research shows everybodys
irrational, professors included! But it was unclear that he convinced the
members of the audience he really meant it. And they apparently found this
discomforting.
There were less discomforting moments in Lisbon. The convention gave an
award to George Marcus, one of the founders of the discipline, who has
dedicated his career to the optimistic theory that human beings by nature
readjust their ideas to match the world as it is and not as theyd like it
to bejust as democracy requires.
But this isnt a moment for optimism, is it? What is happening around the
world shows that the far-right is on the march. And when it comes to the
U.S., the problem might be larger than one man. Liberals have been praying
for the end of the Trump presidency, but if Rosenberg is right, democracy
will remain under threat no matter who is in power.
<https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/09/08/shawn-rosenberg-
democracy-228045/>